'Genocide' still word Obama shuns for Turks' murder of Armenians

Tim Rutten

Published 12:00 am, Monday, April 25, 2011

THE line between prudence and moral cowardice can be a fine one, particularly when it comes to diplomacy.

For Americans, the question of where and how to make such distinctions has a particular urgency as we commemorate the 96th anniversary of the genocide inflicted on Armenians by Ottoman Turks. In massacres from 1915 to 1923, more than 1.5 million Armenians were killed and eastern Anatolia was ethnically cleansed of a people whose presence there extended to antiquity.

None of the participants in a Capitol Hill commemoration heard from President Barack Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concerning the historical reality of the genocide. That's because this administration, like all its predecessors, is straddling a fine line -- one that appears to be a distinction without a difference.

For years, Congress has considered in various forms a resolution that would recognize officially the mass murder of Armenians that occurred in the Ottoman Empire's waning years as genocide. This is something many countries have done. But contemporary Turkey, a key U.S. ally and reliable NATO partner, adamantly objects to such a designation. Rather than offend the Turks, who threaten retaliation if Congress approves the resolution, this administration, like its predecessors, opposes the resolution.

It's an act of expedience that bites with particular sharpness because Obama declared, when a candidate, that "America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide." This raises the question of why Obama does not do so and why the administration opposes the resolution.

The measure's author, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., wrote to the president: "I ask you to return to the clarity you so forcefully expressed in 2008 ... (and) stand with the ever-dwindling number of survivors, as well as the descendants of others, who ... continue to suffer the 'double killing' of denial, by referring to it as a genocide."

Clarity, though, is something the president seems determined to avoid. On last year's memorial anniversary, for example, he issued a statement that scrupulously avoided the word "genocide."

One of the cruelest of the paradoxes at play is that the Polish legal scholar -- later, a U.S. citizen -- who coined the term "genocide," Raphael Lemkin, and whose work is the basis for the international legal sanctions against genocide, did so because of the Armenians. As he told one interviewer: "I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. First to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, (Adolf) Hitler took action."

The Armenian genocide was widely documented as it occurred. Numerous Western governments protested to the Ottomans. Imperial German officers serving with their Ottoman allies sent home accounts of massacres. The New York Times published nearly 150 dispatches about the killings.

Still, contemporary Turkey, which is several regimes and nearly 100 years removed from the Ottoman Empire, insists that others join it in the delusion that history is not history.

We keep the memory of tragic wickedness, such as the Armenian genocide, not simply out of respect for those who died, but also in the hope that their example will strengthen our resolve to confront the next cabal of murderers, who doubtless will come. Pretending otherwise -- for whatever reason -- is not prudence, but cowardice.